Antiques Roadshow: 40 Years of Great Finds. Paul Atterbury

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       Hugh Scully, David Battie and Paul Atterbury after filming the William Burges bottle.

      AN EXTRAORDINARY FIND

      During the filming, the lady owner was asked about the background to the bottle. All she knew was that her father, a travelling salesman, had bought it in about 1950 from an antique shop somewhere along the Great North Road. She explained that her father, who had an extraordinary eye and great curiosity, often came home with strange things that he had found on his travels. She remembered that the bottle was one of the most unusual things he found and that he had paid £100 for it, which at the time had seemed a huge amount of money. Having recovered from her shock at the cost, she had forgotten about it, only finding it again after her father’s death.

      She revealed that she had never looked at it in detail and had not seen the signature on the enamel band. When it was pointed out to her, she said it meant nothing to her as she had never heard of Burges. Bringing it to the Roadshow had been a last-minute decision, and she said she had very nearly not bothered to come.

      AN AUCTION-STYLE VALUATION

      Paul and David did the valuation in the form of an auction, taking it in turns to bid until the price reached £30,000. The owner was amazed, but said immediately that it was going back in the sideboard where it lived. Since then, it has never been seen again. Attempts to trace the owner and the bottle during the preparation of this book were unsuccessful. It has not appeared on the market, although similar metalwork by Burges has been sold. It would be a tragedy if this great treasure, lost for a century before its brief Roadshow appearance, is now lost again.

      Paul still remembers the sense of excitement and discovery when he first saw the bottle lying in the shopping basket. ‘I have always loved Victorian design, particularly exceptional things like this. Burges was a genius, staggeringly original in his ideas and his craft. Great metalwork by him so rarely comes onto the market. We have had one other major Burges piece in forty years of the Roadshow, a brooch that Geoffrey Munn found. I still feel exactly the same about the bottle, it will always be a highlight of my Roadshow life. It was a classic case of being in the right place at the right time. And sharing it with David was a treat, I think we both knew we were very lucky.’

      Today, the William Burges bottle is probably worth £60,000.

A SIOUX WARRIOR BRONZE

      One of the highlights of a rather wet Roadshow at Bodnant Gardens, Wales, in 2009 was a powerful equestrian bronze of a Sioux warrior. Furniture specialist Christopher Payne, who has written books about nineteenth century bronzes, was excited to see it, partly because of its rarity and also because it is unusual to find American bronzes of this quality in Britain.

      Called Appeal to the Great Spirit, and the final sculpture in a series of four equestrian pieces known as the Epic of the Indian, it was modelled in 1909 by Cyrus Dallin and cast in Paris. The first of the series, A Signal of Peace, was shown in Chicago in 1893; the second The Medicine Man in Paris in 1899; the third, The Protest in St Louis in 1904; and the fourth, Appeal, in Paris in 1909. Born in Utah in 1861, Dallin was a prolific and well-known sculptor who produced over 240 works, many inspired by a view of American history that he shared with Frederick Remington, the other great American sculptor of this period. Dallin grew up with native North American children, developing a great respect for tribal history and culture at a time when that aspect of American history was under threat. The full-size version of Appeal to the Great Spirit has stood outside the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston since 1912. In America, there are other full-size versions of what is now seen as Dallin’s greatest work. In 1922 a small edition of small versions was issued, with other editions following until Dallin’s death in 1944. Since then, this iconic sculpture has been frequently reproduced.

      Christopher Payne often picks this as one of his favourite Roadshow moments, because the bronze brought to Bodnant was one of the early casts, not a later reproduction. For that reason he valued it between £60,000 and £80,000, knowing that another early cast had sold in New York in 2005 for $120,000. He explained the bronze’s powerful message to the owner, namely that the story of native North American culture was being obliterated by the rapid development of industrialised white America, a message that perhaps resonates even more powerfully today. Hence the title – the Appeal to the Great Spirit – to save the tribe and all it represents.

      The owner knew little about it, having acquired it about ten years earlier from his wife’s father, someone he described as ‘an eccentric local bank manager whose hobby was marrying wealthy heiresses’.

OZZY THE OWL

      ‘An ordinary slipware mug would have been an exciting find but the figures, like Ozzy, are rarer still, so he really was a very important discovery.’

      Henry Sandon

      In September 1989, Northampton’s Derngate Centre was the setting for one of the Roadshow’s most famous finds – a Staffordshire slipware owl with a detachable head, known ever since as Ozzy the Owl, even though this was the name of the mascot used by Sheffield Wednesday Football Club. The lady owner brought the owl to the Roadshow on the bus, and was very taken aback by the excitement it had generated. She could not remember how it had come into the family, only that it had been there for years, first owned by her aunt and then by her mother, and had often been used, without the head, as a flower vase.

      AN IMPORTANT AND DISTINCTIVE DISCOVERY

      Slipware is one of the earliest and most distinctive types of British domestic pottery, widely in use throughout the seventeenth century. The technique of decorating ordinary red, brown or buff clays with slip, or liquid clay, in other colours is even older, dating at least from the medieval period. Various decorative techniques, including pouring or dotting the slip onto the surface, scratching designs through the poured slip – a process known as sgraffito – and feathering it into swirly patterns with a quill, were all carried out before the pot was fired. When fully decorated, the СКАЧАТЬ